Saturday, April 9, 2011

The girls (my mom, sister-in-law Mary, sister Diane & I) decided to have a Priority Quilt weekend to christen my new studio space. My husband & I worked feverishly to get it close to finished in time for the gathering, and I spent a lot of time organizing and cleaning too.

This is sort of a "before" picture - before we really got into the thick of creativity and craziness . . .

This is a quilt my mom started (and finished, too!) - she wanted to do a crazy quilt, so we pulled out some crazy fabric and some of my hand dyes and started figuring out exactly how to put it together. You can see this quilt on the Quilts Waiting for Assignment page , it's #6885, the picture will be up when Diane gets to that batch of quilts to post, but the story behind it is there now.

On Monday, Diane's friend Andee (on the right, Mom on the left) joined us for the day and worked on her own creation, using some hand dyed velvet as the centerpiece. You'll have to wait a bit to see hers, as she didn't quite get finished before it was time to go. You can see Mom's finished quilt on the ironing table if you look closely - it's darling!

Here is Mary, working on her third Priority Quilt, this one will be so cute!

And finally, on Tuesday, when everyone had figured out how the machines worked and where things were in the studio, I got to work on a Priority Quilt of my own. It's not registred yet, so I don't have a number, but I will post about it soon since it is finished except for a label.

Funny tidbit about this quilt - I did some machine applique using the feather stitch, then did some tiny stippling which seemed to be going oddly, but also seemed to fit the character of the quilt. When I got all done, I realized that I had done the whole thing in free motion with the machine still set to the feather stitch! I'll try to get a picture of the quilting for you.

So here's the "after" shot, not too much mess left, but I will have to go and straighten things out a bit and put a few spools of thread away. All in all, I'd say it was a smashing success, we got lots of parts and pieces of PQ's done, and several finished to the label. Well done girls!!